Blackbox Trophy Season 8 is ending midnight between Thursday and Friday. Coach wintergreen13 seems to be able to hold on to the top squad spot with a phenomenal record of 43 / 11 / 6 for the squad. On the individual team side, Spence's 14 / 0 / 1 Orcs ended up just a hair better than a group of seven (7) teams at just 0.5 points behind. It's been a very very competitive season with lots of incredibly strong coaches participating over the course of it. I'm super happy to see such an amazing level of participation for this season.

There's surely an enormous amount of things I could write about this season, how it progressed, and the various results, but I will leave that for the time being and focus on two very important topics for the Blackbox Trophy: The Steel Gauntlet playoff, and BBT Season 9.

Steel Gauntlet
First off, the Steel Gauntlet Playoffs. Assuming nothing unexpected happens, the draw for this will take place very close to the technical end of the season (midnight between Thursday and Friday, server time). There are a couple of things to remember:

1. I do not intend to allow time to do pre-playoff changes. Teams are expected to be in "Ready to Play" or "Waiting for Tournament" state (meaning you have to get them past the post-match status). The group page states your team will lose their spot if this is not the case, but I will not be quite that strict fir this first Steel Gauntlet and will instead go through the qualified teams and click past the post-match state for the teams that are still in post-match. These teams are not going to be allowed to roll back and do last minute changes in the interest of keeping it fair. Please try to go through the post-match sequence on your own though, to spare me the extra clicks.

2. The tournament will run on a weekly round schedule, but may be slowly adjusted over time to fit with the typical Wednesday - Wednesday schedule of other majors. Depending on the speed of the first round being completed, this may be either shortening the first few rounds or lengthening them. I half expect the playoff to be completed faster than normal considering the average of 3-4 games per week that people have been playing during the season.

3. The prize won't be anything in-game, but will instead be a BB boxed team (handled as a gift from the appropriate GW store for the region of the winner). We'll see if this prize ends up being permanent going forward, but the intent was to have a fun prize for this first one without making something too overpowered. I am assuming a lot of the people playing BBT will mostly just retire the teams anyway and restart with new teams for the next season.

Speaking of...

BBT Season 9
This season, we are introducing another team tier to the mix, primarily as a response to Goblins needing to be bumped further down. Instead of introducing a -1 cost tier, we're bumping up the baseline cost of all teams 1 point and adding 4 points to the squad budget before doing the season balance adjustments. The adjustments are for the most part based on Season 8 results, and are going to be as follows (note that the movements are adjusted for the baseline cost increase):

Tier 1 (Cost 4)
- Orc
- Shambling Undead
- Underworld Denizens
- ↑Amazon
- ↑Norse
Tier 2 (Cost 3)
- ↓Dwarf
- ↓Human
- ↓Chaos Dwarf
- ↓Old World Alliance
- Snotling
- Dark Elf
- Elven Union
- Lizardmen
- Necromantic Horror
- Skaven
- Tomb Kings
- ↑High Elf
- ↑Chaos Renegade
- ↑Imperial Nobility
Tier 3 (Cost 2)
- Black Orc
- Chaos Chosen
- Wood Elf
- ↑Khorne
Tier 4 (Cost 1)
- ↓Nurgle
- ↓Ogre
- Halfling
- Vampire

Tier 5 (Cost 0)
- ↓Goblin

As per usual, you will be able to designate the squads on the BBT page directly after midnight and you can create the teams prior to the start of the season if you wish (just can't play or start any games with them until after the squad is designated)